|
|
| Industry Review |
 prev | index | next  |
 |
| Manufacturing |
|
In the Manufacturing Industry, any competitive flow of goods depends a great deal on the flow of information between every link in the supply chain - real-time information must be continuously available for access and collaboration. Any breached, slowly delivered or dropped information can severely impact the competitive performance of the manufacturing enterprise.
Application and integration tools can help to streamline the flow of real-time information, but only through a fully realized monitoring solution can the network, the true medium of information, enable its secure and continuous transfer.
|
Industry drivers causing rapid change to the Manufacturer's IT infrastructure:
Today's manufacturer is constantly under threat from "leaner", more streamlined competitors who are able to quickly produce and supply their customers with newer goods at a lower cost. The only way to overtake this threat is to drive performance through more sophisticated levels of information management.
Globalization:
Expanding globalization is opening up new supply lines, new factories, and new markets. The large manufacturing enterprise must be equipped with efficient standardized processes to implement in each new environment. Every IT branch of the manufacturing enterprise must be visible, secure, and compliant with regional regulations.
Regulations for Public Companies:
Large manufacturers, like all publicly traded companies, are subject to regulations regarding information access and accountability. The 2002 US Sarbanes-Oxley Act(SOX)requires companies to assess any risk associated with information technology or the internal process that may impact the accurate and timely reporting of certain sensitive information.
Need for Effective, Standardized Information Flow:
The continuous flow of relevant information between need-to-know parties is the cornerstone of operational excellence in the Manufacturing Industry: R&D must collaborate and coordinate with suppliers, plant engineers and corporate office; sales and support must have access to real-time customer, inventory and logistical information; and corporate office needs to know what customers / products / events are negatively or positively impacting the supply chain.
If accurate, up-to-date information is not continuously available a manufacturer's competitive performance can be severely diminished.
Achieving and maintaining a competitive edge depends not only on information flow but on the active management of that flow.
Costs:
With budget spent toward service and management systems that enable communication between various operations within the enterprise, the network monitoring infrastructure is often overlooked as an opportunity to create competitive advantage. Systems that enable communication, however, cannot be guaranteed safe or even purposeful if the network through which they operate is not adequately monitored for security and performance.
The pressure then becomes balancing a budget between higher level applications and the IT infrastructure that ultimately supports them; although the reality of any network monitoring deployment is that it can be needlessly costly if its architecture is not properly planned.
Network monitoring is essential to the timeliness and security of information transfer between the manufacturer and all its stakeholders.
Traditionally, network taps have proved a superior network access tool over the use of span ports and hubs; however, through user-driven innovations, VSS monitoring is now providing the manufacturing sector with total visibility and outstanding cost savings in monitoring deployments, specifically through the use of its proprietary line of distributed taps.
In a global environment with manufacturing facilities in multiple regions, the infrastructure can vary widely and require a variety of distributed monitoring tools.
Importance of Performance Analyzers and Taps to the Manufacturer's competitive flow of information:
Performance analyzers are crucial to determining bottleneck and performance failures not only in the corporate environment but also in the operation facilities.
VSS monitoring centralizes the network monitoring infrastructure and reduces the number of monitoring tools required at each location, thereby, greatly lowering incidence response time.
*Analyzers - Analyzer-Tap Solution Diagrams
Importance of Forensics boxes and Taps to the regulatory compliance of the Manufacturing Enterprise network:
Maintaining a continuous record of network traffic can be crucial to achieving network security, corporate accountability and, ultimately, regulatory compliance. Forensics tools deployed in combination with VSS monitoring Taps can be enormously leveraged, allowing a single Forensics device to actively monitor large numbers of inline and span inputs, without compromise to signal integrity.
*Forensics - Forensic-Tap Solution Diagrams
Other monitoring tools and Taps:
Monitoring tools such as IDSes and sniffers can be useful or even essential depending on the structure and sensitivity of your network.
*IDes - IDS-Tap Solution Diagrams
VSS monitoring's Taps are capable of more than just 'tapping' a network signal to a monitoring device. They can be the driving force behind providing exactly what any large Manufacturer demands from its network: exceptional performance and security, compliance with relevant IT regulations and conformance to a set IT budget.
VSS monitoring's Distributed line of Taps enable deployment of a hierarchical monitoring architecture that allows for central, remote monitoring of multiple networks with as little as a single monitoring tool. Having central visibility and constant access to every critical link in a network can mean near instant troubleshooting, less downtime and, of course, compliance with current IT regulations.
The following diagram illustrates one possible monitoring deployment within a large Manufacturer's network.
|
|
|
| |
|
